The Justice Department on Friday ordered California election officials to identify suspected noncitizens on voter rolls and set aside their mail-in ballot – warning that officials who knowingly count ballots cast by noncitizens could face criminal liability.
The stipulation marks an escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to scrutinize voter rolls as the government continues to double down on claims of voter fraud, fueled by Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread election cheating.
The administration’s claims have faced scrutiny, and some initial findings have not held up under further review. In Nevada, for example, DHS told state officials that its initial finding of 15,900 potentially noncitizen registrants was preliminary and unvetted, and that it had confirmed only 185 through manual review.
Last month, Nevada officials told DHS their subsequent review found that all 185 were US citizens, a conclusion the federal agency disputes.
Of course it’s the racism, but the ID thing is used to make it sound less racist. We do have to show ID to register to vote in the US, but like your experience in Canada that is mainly to establish your address, and which district you belong to. But all those IDs are administered by the States, and are issued to non-citizens as well as citizens, so cannot be used as proof of citizenship. For that, you need a passport, naturalization paper, or US birth certificate, all of which are not normally carried by people casually (and are expensive to replace if lost). It gets even more complicated if you changed your name for any reason since you were born.
The US has a long history of putting up barriers to voting so that low-income voters don’t bother, going all the way back to the poll taxes of the early 1900’s. So while this is camouflaged as an ID issue, it’s just a modern poll tax.
I have a passport, and then paid again for the passport card, then paid a third time for the Enhanced License that makes my State license equivalent to a passport card. So I am covered, but I could afford the extra $30 for each card. That homeless guy in the subway who was born in NYC but has had all his paperwork stolen for years should have just as much of a right to vote than I do, no matter whether or not he has the proof on his person.
I don’t think I was clear about the racism remark. Yes, the ID thing is racist/xenophobic/scapegoating.
However, I was specifically calling criminal disenfranchisement racist. And saying that the existence of criminal disenfranchisement makes maintaining voter rolls uniquely challenging.
In the US, elections are administered by the States, and the issue of criminal disenfranchisement is generally up to each state.
Trump himself is a good case study in this. While he has been convicted of a felony, the State law in Florida regarding voting explicitly references the law in the state where he was convicted (New York in this case), and NY law says that felons are only disenfranchised when they are in jail. So, since Trump never went to jail, he was never disenfranchised.
So, there are states where felons are barred for voting for life, while Trump still gets to vote.
Yes, this is what I was referring to with the “patchwork” of laws. Because there is no country wide list of eligible voters, and because a person’s ability to vote can change so many times and is different in different states, it would be a massive undertaking to generate a reliable voters list. Requiring ID to prove citizenship would not mean the person was eligible to vote. People who vote when not eligible to do so based on prior felonies face new felony charges.
Here is an example case.
Broseph got charged with being a felon! Land of the free!
I picked the first case that showed up in my search and it’s a white dude but the racism part came from how a lot of these laws came at the same time as laws meant to criminalize behavior associated with Black folks who were previously enslaved, either criminalizing generally harmless behavior (loitering) or criminalizing things that result from being excluded from the formal economy.